Pierre Sauvage is a floor guy. “I like classical structures and strong-looking floors, like you see in the work of David Hicks in the ’70s,” says Sauvage. The evidence is all around us in this grand, light-filled apartment on Paris’s rue de Varenne. Sauvage and his partner moved here three years ago from an apartment up the street that dated from a gaudier, more show-offy century. It was nice, says Sauvage, but it just wasn’t the century where his head was at.

“We had no particular reason for moving,” says Sauvage with a small shrug. “The other place was very 19th century, which is quite comfortable for a country house but a little out of date for an apartment. The 18th century goes much better with contemporary style. And then we just had a coup de foudre for this place.”

It’s not hard to see why. On this bright morning, the sun is streaming across the open courtyard through the neck-snappingly tall windows and onto the almond-colored 18th-century paneling with its fluted Corinthian pilasters.
All the paneling in the 3,000-square-foot apartment is historically classified and had to be handled with kid gloves. Just cleaning and waxing it took the better part of a year. On the other hand, Sauvage had free rein with the floors, which he layered with bold rugs that anchor the rooms visually, à la Hicks: a bright-blue geometric in the dining room, a leopard print in the library, and a riotous blue-and-red Smyrna floral in Sauvage’s bath. Almost all the rugs come from one place, Casa Lopez in Paris, for one simple reason: Sauvage bought the company shortly after moving into the new apartment.

In the library, a family portrait overlooks a Vintage sofa and a 1970s chair, both pieces (and curtains) in an Aldeco cotton velvet from Scalamandré. On mantel, Pair of 1950s brass bouillotte lamps; Casa Lopez rug.

Buying Casa Lopez was something of a foregone conclusion for Sauvage. He had made his career in marketing and public relations for fashion and design clients, Casa Lopez among them. Bernard Magniant founded the company in 1983 to mine the rich design heritage of Spain, where most of Casa Lopez’s rugs are still made. (Magniant’s wife, legendary PR executive Véronique Lopez, handled press for the company, and Sauvage befriended the couple when he worked at her agency in the 1990s.) The company is small: Most of its sales come through three Paris stores—one on the Left Bank and two on the Right—but its fans know what they’re coming for. These are not rugs for the shy: Birds, pomegranates, arabesques, and other curlicues spill out with Latin exuberance. (Sauvage has since killed the pomegranates: “In Spain, people know it’s a pomegranate; in France, they call it an onion.”)

“I always wanted to buy the company. I loved the Lopez taste, the vibrant colors, the mix of jute and wool, poor and rich, and the fact that their prices weren’t too high—if you buy a Casa Lopez fluorescent green rug for €850, you don’t have to live with it your whole life,” says Sauvage.

Much as he loved Casa Lopez’s splashy Mediterranean aesthetic, Sauvage didn’t purchase the company to serve as its caretaker. He has already added tableware and occasional furniture to Casa Lopez’s merchandise mix. Ultimately, he envisions it as a global brand devoted to l’art de vivre—the French idea of gracious living. “I know exactly where I want to take this brand and what I can do with it,” he says.

A new collection of limited-edition rugs, for instance, comes directly from Sauvage’s love of books. Between 1941 and 1967, the prestigious French publisher Gallimard employed two artists, Paul Bonet and Mario Prassinos, to make geometric designs for its book covers. They’re charming, quirky things, and it’s easy to see why Sauvage cherished them and collected all 552 titles. “I always said those covers would make wonderful rugs,” he says, “so I went to Gallimard, and they said yes immediately.”

If Sauvage spends much of his free time in the apartment’s library, he also likes to hang out in his bath (“I adore taking baths,” he admits). There’s a cushy 19th-century fauteuil for reading and a big tub facing a TV screen on the blue-lacquered wall. (Blue is the apartment’s dominant color. It’s Sauvage’s favorite color after olive green, but he used that color so exuberantly in his country house near Giverny that he imposed an informal moratorium on it here. Even so, a fair amount of green managed to sneak into the apartment anyway.)

Sauvage carpeted the bath with the old beat-up Smyrna rug that he found at the Drouot auction house. He’s an inveterate chineur, which is what the French call people who love hunting around for stuff, and has been popping into Drouot regularly for years. (“There’s a bit of everything there, and the neighborhood restaurants are quite good.”)

In the center of the bath, Sauvage and his decorator, Franz Potisek, cut a hole in the ceiling and surrounded it with a balustrade in the dressing room above. It’s an ingenious way to gain some height and tie the space visually to the upstairs level. Sauvage and Potisek have forged an instinctive working relationship over the years: Potisek had already designed an apartment and the Giverny country house for Sauvage, and their mutual confidence comes across in this apartment’s natural, unfussy feeling. I ask Sauvage whether he and Potisek ever disagreed about wall treatments—there are almost none in the whole apartment. He points down to the Casa Lopez rug in the dining room where we’re standing. It’s crawling with vivid geometric figures. “Oh, no, we both agreed. With things like that on the floor, you don’t need wallpaper.”

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